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Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own by Kate Bolick: Review

A thinking woman’s treatise on the single life explores its joys by focusing on some of history’s great spinsters.

Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own, by Kate Bolick, Crown, 336 pages, $31.

Kate Bolick, author of Spinster. (Willy Somma)

By Elizabeth WarkentinSpecial to the Star

Sat., May 9, 2015

“Whom to marry, and when will it happen — these two questions define every woman’s existence.” So begins Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, Kate Bolick’s cerebral yet deeply personal essay about the joys of remaining single.

Seeking to make sense of her life since the death of her feminist mother, who died when Bolick was 23, and longing to recreate the conversations she shared with the woman she so admired, Bolick turns to reading the works of early feminists, “great spinsters throughout history”, who over the course of their lives also struggled with the dichotomy between married life and the “spinster dream.” For the purposes of this book she settled on five “dead forgotten women writers”: poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, essayist Maeve Brennan, novelist Edith Wharton, columnist Neith Boyce and social visionary Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Throughout the book, Bolick weaves her “awakeners” stories with her own experiences as a writer and dating singleton, and draws valuable lessons from each.

At 28, ensconced in a marriage-track relationship with a man most women would consider a keeper, Bolick feels bored, smothered, secretly nursing what she terms a “spinster wish.” Yet her conventional voice shouts that to even consider leaving her boyfriend “on the cusp of thirty felt recklessly immature.” When she ends up having an affair, an act she now considers to be the best mistake of her life, she breaks up with the long-term boyfriend. Remorse ensues. Obsessing. Again the conventional voice telling her she’s making her life harder than necessary. Indeed, a very real concern for Bolick throughout, and a question all single women ask themselves: Can she afford solitude? Will she end up a bag lady?

While the author relishes the freedom of dating, of feeling more alive than she’s ever felt, Bolick is not blind to the sacrifices of life as a single woman — even when by choice. She knows she would make a great mother, but is convinced she would be “erased” by pregnancy and motherhood.

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Nor is she immune to the loneliness and societal prejudices of those who follow the “lockstep progression toward the American dream.” For the author, however, the two most important markers of a happy and successful life are to be a “real” writer and a financially independent woman “for who sex and love is a crucial part of life, but not its summation.” These, not marriage, are her priorities.

Now 42, Bolick still experiences loneliness but has learned to live happily with her choices. While the writing in the early chapters can be disjointed, Spinster stands as a testament to her hard-won epiphany, an inspiration to many a young woman wanting to create a life of her own.

I do have an issue with the book. Neither Bolick nor her awakeners are spinsters in the true sense of the word. By her own admission, the author is a very social person. She makes new friends easily and has a very active social life. She also has little difficulty meeting stable men and forms intimate, meaningful attachments with them. Certainly, were she a person for whom integrity and honesty are not as fundamental as they are to Bolick, she could easily have married had she been so inclined. Alas, this is not the case for many single women over a certain age. This spinster, for one, wonders what the author’s advice would be to women for whom remaining single was not, initially, a choice. What might she say to those who are less extroverted and who do not have active social lives or have trouble meeting stable, available men?

Yet I can’t help but admire the author’s courage and optimism. Spinster is an unflinchingly honest, well-written and well-researched book, a thinking woman’s treatise on the single life. Many a singleton will be grateful to Bolick for debunking the myth that to be female and unmarried is to be somehow defective. Moreover, in absolving the term “spinster” of its negative connotations and in redefining what it means to be single, Bolick reminds women that it is possible to be both alone and happy.

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